"Crossing a bare common without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. . . . Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign. . . . the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836
The spirit of American Transcendentalism has never left the American consciousness and therefore American politics. The first settlers to Massachusetts considered their new home a dark and frightening wilderness, Godless and full of demons, but the 19th Century brought a new perspective. The natural world became a source of inspiration, and indeed itself a pure expression of the Universal Being, the God of Abraham revealing himself in nature. At the turn of the 20th Century a conservation movement established and protected national parks and monuments. Fifty years ago, with a Republican president, Americans passed a Clean Water Act and a Clean Air Act. We celebrated Earth Day.
Emersonian thinking endures. Facebook profiles report being "Spiritual, but not religious."
Emerson's essay foretold the two centuries of conflict over nature as a work-a-day resource versus nature as religion. "The charming landscape which i saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This the best part of these men's farms. . . . "
One man's farm and livelihood is another man's inspiration and religion. There has been a struggle between man's "dominion" over the earth and man's preservation of it in unchanged--i.e. unspoiled--form.
Today many Americans measure carbon in the air. Democratic candidates for president called climate the single most important issue facing America. For many Americans, what is happening with our planet is worse than a disaster. It is a desecration.
Michael Trigoboff has a Ph.D. in Computer Science, had a long career in industry, and now teaches Computer Science at Portland Community College. He read yesterday's comment by Larry DiCara on society's downward spiral in morality, respect, and decency. Americans have replaced one religion with another, he says.
Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff
The power of religion has been eroding since the dawn of science and the industrial revolution. God died sometime around the beginning of the 20th Century. That's a problem because humans are hard-wired by evolution for religion. Once religion was gone, other things shaped like religions opportunistically filled that empty space: communism in the past, currently environmentalism and "social justice."
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| Trigoboff |
Here's what Michael Crichton had to say about environmentalism:
Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability.
These are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Environmentalism even has indulgences, in the form of carbon credits.
The tendency towards religion is apparent even in the field of computer science. Computer people tend to be smart and obsessive, highly opinionated and very good at arguing. As a result, disagreements break out in the field that the participants often refer to as "religious wars." A famous example is a dispute over different ways to store numbers in computer memory. They are referred to as "big endian” and “little endian,” a reference to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, in which he satirized a religious war between Christian sects by describing a country where people were killing each other over which end of a soft-boiled egg to open. The dispute over number storage got so bad that someone wrote a long essay called On Holy Wars And A Plea For Peace in an effort to lower the level of conflict.
Traditional religion, when it was widespread, had the ability to unify us. But then its power dissipated. Different people gravitated towards different religions, and our politics currently have the flavor of the religious wars of the past.
In higher education there’s a religion called "social justice" that is becoming dominant. You can be ostracized or even lose your job for saying something considered to be heresy by the high priests. Recently there has been an innovation: in order to be hired you have to provide a "diversity statement," which is basically a declaration that you are a total believer.
We have something like the Tower of Babel happening in the sphere that used to be occupied by institutional religion. In the absence of a strong consensus, it's no wonder that we don't agree about (among other things) what constitutes morality or decency.
Here's another way of looking at this:
Think of World War II as a battle between crabs. One of them (the United States) killed and ate two of its enemies (Germany and Japan). Now it was time to grow. Crabs grow by splitting their hard shell and emerging from it. Once out of the shell they can grow, but they are soft and vulnerable. Once they have grown, they create a new, larger shell.
I think that (metaphorically speaking) the United States split and emerged from its shell right after World War II. Then we grew, and all kinds of things happened: beatniks, hippies, New Age religions, cults, etc. For the past couple of decades, we have been trying to grow a new shell, but we can't agree on the shape of it, so things stay chaotic and society becomes increasingly dysfunctional.
I think things will stay this way until a new religion (or a new ideology shaped like a religion) comes along. Or maybe the current pandemic will knock us a level or two down Maslow's Hierarchy to a place where we agree more with each other.
10 comments:
Wow that is the most esoteric mumbo jumble of gobbledy goo from the illustrious computer 'Dr' who can't write a prescription. True environmentalism is no different than anti-environmentalism if you look at it. Look at the donors, look at the beneficiaries, go watch the court cases. It's about one thing and one thing only: money.
social justice in quotes?...But I digress...
The writer seems to be defending something without stating directly what it is. Littering?
Anyway I'll bite. Environmentalism is a religion. Religion is hardwired (unproven assertion, but ok for the sake of argument) so if environmentalism is a religion ergo, it must be hardwired as well. Freedom of religion is supposed to be a right or what? If one is an atheist I imagine their wiring must not be up to code.
The environmental movement started in the 60's with a growing awareness of air and water pollution. This became more and more evident and with the data concerning CO2 emissions we now know that human industrialization is radically altering the climate of Earth, and not in a good way.
This is a complex topic but one fundamental political/economic aspect of the issue is that producers do not pay the environmental cost of goods and services, whether they are luxuries or necessities, for the sake of profit, and societies pay the price in the form of increased mortality among other ills, like species extinction (humans are species too!). I guess if you don't believe science these facts can be disputed, but I wonder about the motives of a god that's ok with an ocean full of plastic instead of fish, and who seems to have more affection for Covid-19 than us. I see these attitudes as simply the persistence of 14th century beliefs (The Sun revolves around the Earth) that are highly resistant to contradictory information.
Can we have a modern technological society and a pristine environment? It's not a choice. It's a necessity for survival. Surely our technological gifts include the ability to solve this problem, otherwise what purpose do they ultimately serve?
Anyway, if environmentalism is a religion (it's not, it’s science!) I'll join as opposed to one whose god seems to be indifferent to turning the planet into an uninhabitable lifeless rock.
Rick,
Social justice in quotes? Deservedly so given the religious dogma it has turned into in the world of higher education. But I too digress…
Consider what we mean by "religion." By definition, it concerns things beyond the rational that cannot be empirically verified.
I did not mention the religious aspect of environmentalism to prohibit you or anyone else from taking up that particular religion. I mentioned it to point out that once you have entered the religious aspect of environmentalism, you are beyond where you can have a rational discussion with someone who does not share that religion.
There are many aspects of environmentalism that I agree with. For example, we should not be dumping God knows how many weird chemicals into our waterways. We should not be polluting the air with other weird chemicals. We should not be killing off entire complex food chains in the oceans. These are all things that I can imagine having a rational discussion about.
But when we get into the more religious aspect of environmentalism, when St. Greta of the Carbon Apocalypse condemns us all as sinners, we're beyond the arena of rational discussion.
Look at the environmentalist opposition to nuclear power. Is that "science?" Is that opposition based on a rational evaluation of the costs and benefits of that technology? Is a totally carbon-neutral power generation technology so terrible that it cannot even be contemplated? Is science telling us that? Or is it something deeper, something with a strong religious aspect?
Some environmental beliefs are based on science. But not all of them. The religious aspect of environmentalism is part of what makes it so difficult to come to a consensus.
Pretty much agree with Rick on this one, however: I'm not all that happy about carbon offsets, but it's a start (albeit a late one at this stage).
We each need to be stewards of the planet and that may require an attitude adjustment not necessarily scientific in nature. From what I've read and heard, our indigenous brothers and sisters seemed to practice a reverence and a stewardship of our Mother that was not informed by science. Every gift of Science seems to have brought its countering downside. "Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art!/Who alterest all things with they peering eyes,/Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,/Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?"
The pandemic, courtesy of Mother Nature, has provided us the opportunity to become creative, conscious consumers. Shall we listen?
Andy Seles
Conservation was rational. The new environmentalism is radical, faith-based, and must not be questioned.
Mr Trigoboff is right about everything, including "social justice" and its crusaders.
I love the quote by theoretical physicist James Gates who points out limits of empiricism which we mistake for rationalism. He wrote that “Often nonscientists (and I would argue scientists as well) appear subject to an illusion that science uncovers all truths for our species. This is not the work of science…While other fields of human thought are said to present truths, science only reveals theories”
Religions wrestle with the notion that we are a meaning-seeking beings, many with eternal significance. As Gates says, Science is the wrong lens for that. So my question - Isn't Conservation really only "rational" if you think preserving our environment and perpetuation of our species has some kind of moral value? Otherwise we are just a cosmic spec that will eventually vaporize anyway and all of our conservation efforts are futile.
Most people who I speak with these days have strong (usually negative) opinions about religion without having done the hard critical-thinking work of understanding any of it.
Science is a nice little bright clearing in an immense dark and scary forest. We like it in the clearing. It feels very safe and we think that we know what is going on. We can do things in the clearing that are very cool, like inventing airplanes and smart phones.
But the dark forest surrounds us, and every now and then something emerges from the forest that we don’t understand or have the first clue how to control.
People cling to science. Many people are too scared of facing the darkness to admit to themselves that they just don’t know. They apply scientific methods to all sorts of things. But it’s the wrong tool for many of those jobs.
Science can’t tell us the answers to theological, philosophical, or political questions.
There’s an old joke about the drunk on his hands and knees under a streetlight. A cop comes along and asks him, “What are you looking for?“
The drunk says, “My car keys.“
The cop asks, “Where did you lose them?”
The drunk replies, “Back there in the dark alley.“
The cop asks, “So why aren’t you looking back there?“
The drunk replies, “Because this is where the light is.”
No time for Religion when your hair is on fire.
If you were living in Paradise California running down the road to escape the fury of the fire chasing your actual body, seeing burning neighbors trapped in their car, the old couple trapped in their homes you might have a reason to be an environmental fanatic. Maybe many of Paradise California residents have extreme hate of PG@E, hot wind, drought, lack of fire protection and planning, and so on. My point is that the argument of forcing people to be for or against the religion of climate warming is an effete argument. When your hair is on fire you don’t give a shit about environmental debates.
People who have children with extreme asthma because they live down wind of a coal burning plant are not involved in nuances of environmental issues, they are trying to find the money to pay for inhalers. Environmental arguments can be made by the privileged who have time and money to be religious.
Ralph,
That's what I was talking about when I said, "a couple of levels down Maslow's hierarchy."
I support sensible environmentalism. But I am quite allergic to the religious aspects of it.
The Applegate in Southern Oregon is the most likely "Paradise" here. And not because of PGE, but rather because of environmentalism-as-religion run amuck. The religion that refuses to recognize the state of our forests and the necessity of either wholesale clearing out of a few counties or managing them.
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